Metempsychosis

by Robert Buchanan

ROSALIND: Look here what I found on a palm-tree: I was never so be-rhymed since Pythagoras' time, that I was an Irish rat, which I can hardly remember.--As You Like It

I

I distinctly remember (and who dares doubt me?)

  Having been (now, I care not who believes!)

An ape with a forest around about me,

  Prodigious trees and enormous leaves,

Great bulks of flowers, gigantic grasses,

  Boughs that bent not to any gale;

And thence I date my contempt for Asses,

  And my deep respect for the Devil's Tail!

II

I shall never forget the exquisite feeling

  Of elevation, sans thought, sans care,

When I twisted my tail round the wood's bough-ceiling,

  And swung, meditatively, in the air.

There's an advantage! Fairer shapes can

  Aspire, yearn upward, tremble and glow,

But by means of their posteriority, apes can

  Look down on aspirants that walk below!

III

There was a life for a calm philosopher,

  Self supplied with jacket and trousers and socks,

Nothing to learn, no hopes to get cross over,

  A head that resisted the hardest knocks,

Liquor and meat in serene fruition,

  A random income from taxes free,

No cares at all, and but one ambition,

  To swing by the Tail to the bough of a tree!

IV

Whence I firmly believe, to the consternation

  Of puppies who think monkeyosophy sin,

In gradual human degeneration

  And a general apely origin.

Why, the simple truth's in a nutshell or thimble,

  Though it rouses the monkey in ignorant elves;

And the Devil's Tail is a delicate symbol

  Of apehood predominant still in ourselves.

V

Pure class government, family glory,

  Were the delights of that happy lot;

My politics were serenely Tory,

  And I claimed old descent from Heaven knows what:

Whence I boast extraction loftier, nobler,

  Than the beggarly Poets one often meets,

A boast I am happy to share with the cobbler

  Who whisked his Tail out, to whip John Keats.

VI

There was a life, I assever! With reasons

  That lead me to scorn every star-gazing Ass;

And because I loved it, at certain seasons

  'T is a pleasure to gaze in the looking-glass.

When the bright sun beckons the spring, green-deckt, up,

  The Ape wells within me; whenever I see

Mortals look skyward, walking erect up,

  I long for a Tail and a large strong Tree!

"Lothlorien" by Enya